by Jeff Seymour
23 Darkmonth 7959
…they have taken everything. They came in the night, both of them—Aegelden first and then Reth and then Aegelden again. They have killed me, and they promise to do the same again tomorrow, and the next day, and the next. They want offspring. They want half breeds.
I am lost, alone. I hurt. I cry. I shiver and shake and flinch at the smallest noises in the dark, and there is nothing here to comfort me. I cannot speak, cannot weave, cannot hold the pen without shaking. Yenor help me, I cannot even feel.
Vengeance called to her—a deep, dark yearning from the bleakest places in her soul. If confronted with the opportunity to take it, she wasn’t sure what she would do.
She left Jen by the fire. Ren’s door fell from its makeshift bindings at her touch, and her brother followed her into the slums and an autumn night. Ice-rimed mud crunched beneath her feet. A filth-spattered, fetid warren of tents and hovels and seething, miserable humanity stretched before her. A warren she’d grown up in, seen too much in.
A wasteland she was going to try to save.
As she and Ren strode into the city, the moon rose, but what light there was seemed small and insignificant.
FORTY
Two hours before the destruction of Eldan City
Ryse pulled herself up the wall beneath Aegelden Elpioni’s bedroom, slow and careful, trusting Jen’s robe to keep her camouflaged against the white stone. There were few handholds and toeholds, but they were enough to climb on.
She was glad for the climbing. There was no room for thought when she was climbing. No room for doubt. She just found the next hold and pulled herself onward. She kicked her boots off for better traction. The stone hurt her skin, but the pain was inconsequential.
A few minutes later, the tiles of Aegelden Elpioni’s balcony pressed cold and slick against her toes.
It had been easy to get there. No one had stopped a soulweaver and a Twelfthman walking together. Not in the moonlit expanse of Temple Complex, and not in the shadowy gardens behind the Hall of the Twelve either.
The necromancers had been defeated. Molte Eldani was dead. Aesith Pendilon had lost his heir.
The Twelve had become the greatest power in Eldan, and it had made them careless.
The door into Aegelden’s chambers was open, and Ryse crept forward on her stomach. Ren followed. Gauzy curtains drifted in the night breeze behind them.
Ahead, a whale-sized canopy bed glazed with light blue sheets and pillows occupied a raised dais. It sat in the center of a bedroom larger than any home Ryse had ever known. The air smelled of heady incense, and in the blue-white light of the moon, she saw paintings and tapestries, plants in golden urns, plush chairs and cushions and rugs. An archway beyond the bed led to a darkened space she assumed was the wardrobe. Two heavy doors near it were closed and silent, the gateway to the rest of the apartments of Yenor’s Highest.
Aegelden’s sleep sounded deep and peaceful. Untroubled. Unharried by the nightmares he deserved.
Ryse’s hands twitched.
Her eyes met her brother’s. Ren looked cold and ready, as calm as Aegelden’s breathing.
He held up three fingers. Two. One.
Ryse stood.
Aegelden lay in the center of an ocean of cushions and sheets and blankets. A sleeping gown covered his torso, but his legs sprawled naked across his bed. It would take Ryse two steps to get to him. Two steps during which the mattress would move and he would wake. Her heart thundered. Her legs bunched.
She sprang.
As her foot hit the bed, it sank into something soft and liquid and so deep she nearly lost her balance.
A water mattress, she thought.
The waves her step set off raced ahead of her, jostling the pillows, jostling Aegelden. Ryse twisted to keep her balance.
Aegelden sat up and turned toward her.
She stumbled forward another step. The fluid inside the mattress bucked and sloshed. Aegelden’s eyes glowed white, and the River began to swirl.
Ryse jumped on top of him.
She struck him hard on the side of the head, sent him sprawling across the bucking bed and got behind him and wrapped her arm across his throat. Squeezed.
Because if he couldn’t breathe, it would be nearly impossible to weave.
Ren stepped in front of them. He’d drawn one of his swords.
Aegelden stopped struggling.
His blood pulsed hotly beneath Ryse’s arms. She wanted to keep squeezing. Yenor’s eye she wanted to keep squeezing. The darkness in her soul was there, all around her, calling to her, begging her to do it.
“We have a message,” she whispered. Her arms were shaking.
Aegelden swallowed.
“The dragon is coming, and you need to be ready for it. You need—”
“Ryse,” her brother whispered.
Ren was looking across the room, toward the darkened archway that led to the wardrobe. A young woman stood there, leaning against the wall. She had long, straight hair and small, quick eyes. She shivered a little, but she looked calm—more cold than afraid, as if all this was expected somehow.
Ren seemed to recognize her, and he frowned.
“I-it’s time, isn’t it? It,” the young woman mumbled.
Shit, Ryse thought. She might be a guard. Or call a guard.
Aegelden made a choking noise underneath her. His face was turning red. She let up a little—just enough for him to breathe—and watched the River for signs of him shifting it.
He sputtered, and then he spoke.
“You’ve returned. Both of you.” His voice was scratchy.
The darkness in Ryse’s soul roared. Murderer! she wanted to scream. Child-stealing rapist!
“I know about the dragon, child,” Aegelden said. “There is a darkness, in my nightmares, that wasn’t there six months ago. I—”
The doors to Aegelden’s bedroom slammed open.
A shadow moved in the room beyond. The River surged toward it, and then a blindingly bright ribbon of souls whipped toward Ryse. She sucked at the River, but it was coming too fast—too fast—
The ribbon of souls slashed across Aegelden’s throat.
Blood gushed from the wound. Aegelden clutched her arms, like a child. His skin paled rapidly.
The ribbon of souls receded. The shadow stood still in the darkness.
By the time Ryse had gathered enough of the River around her to do anything, Aegelden Elpioni was already dead.
Ryse’s heart hammered. His blood was all over her—soaking her robe, coating her gloves and arms. She flung the body away, focused on the shadow, waiting to see what it would do next.
She hadn’t wanted it to end this way. Not in her fantasies of vengeance, and not in her fantasies of redemption.
Never.
Ren had drawn his other sword. He was standing in front of the bed, facing the shadow that had murdered Aegelden.
A high voice cut through the darkness.
“Don’t worry,” it said. “I got them. I got them all.”
A chill ran down Ryse’s spine. She froze.
Tomenar stepped into the moonlit confines of Aegelden’s chambers.
He wore the gray robe of the Twelfthmen, and he had a long black cloak pinned to his shoulders. Dark bracers enveloped his wrists. Boots the color of charcoal clung to his feet. There was blood caked on them and splashed across the front of his robe.
His teeth flashed, laughing-cat white in the darkness, and there was a spark of madness in his eyes, his hair, his expression. The scar on his head was less visible in the dim light but still there—a purple splotch across him like the hand print of a god.
“This wasn’t the plan, Tom,” said Ren from the edge of the bed. He flicked his eyes toward the girl near the archway. “This was never the plan.”
“N-not him. Im,” the girl whispered. “Not him.” She edged away from Tomenar and moved toward the balcony, pressing her back against the wall.
Tomenar stopped. His face twist
ed. “You left!” he barked. He swung his head from side to side, like a dog. “Left me alone with them! What did you expect?”
Ren swallowed. “I was going to come back, Tom. You know that.”
Tom jabbed a finger toward Ren. “You never wanted to help. You just wanted to leave.”
Ren said nothing. The girl continued to inch toward the balcony.
Tomenar turned and grinned at Ryse.
“Did you like your present, Shar? Did you like the scar I gave you? Did it help you find the truth?” He ground the last two words between his teeth and snapped his head again.
Ryse took a deep breath. “Don’t call me that,” she whispered.
He walked farther into the room.
“Stop, Tom! I mean it!” shouted Ren.
Tomenar shook his head like a dog again. “Stop, Tom! Stop! Stop! Is that all you ever say?”
Ryse stood, slowly. The River was pooling around Tomenar in a thousands-deep well of light.
All of them. He’d killed all of the Twelve. Yenor’s eye.
He stopped a few feet away from Ren. His eyes swirled with soulweaving, and his lips took on a smile that could’ve been benevolent if it hadn’t been mad.
“Don’t worry, Ren,” he said. “I’m not going to hurt you.”
He’s just eighteen, Ryse reminded herself.
Tomenar’s hands moved toward two swords hanging at his waist, and the madness crept farther and farther from his lips until it had taken over his face, his head, his whole body.
Deep in her chest, Ryse felt the same fear she’d felt in the dungeon. It was dangerous to stand where she was standing.
“Not you,” Tom grated.
The River swirled frighteningly fast. It rushed past Ren and flooded toward Ryse. She pushed out with the breath of her soul to deflect it.
Once again, it changed direction at the last moment.
The souls flooded into the chest of the girl from the wardrobe, who was still working her way toward the balcony.
Ren lunged forward. Tomenar parried his thrusts without breaking the weaving. His shouts filled the room.
“I knew it!” he shrieked. “Never me! Always someone else! Never me!”
The girl jerked and fell. Her face turned gray. Ren and Tomenar grunted and shouted. The clangs of them fencing filled the room.
Ryse moved.
She wove the River into a thick, tight band around Tom’s weaving, snapped the souls to the floor, out of the girl, away from her chest.
The girl scrambled back to the wall and pushed herself against it, sucking in desperate, tiny breaths. Her eyes were wide and watery.
Ryse found the fire in her soul again.
She leaped from Aegelden’s bed. The River bounded to her will.
Tom was laughing and screaming and crying, his eyes blazing white. His swords swished like the blade of a reaper.
And on the night Aegelden Elpioni died, his children met in his room and danced the dance of death.
FORTY-ONE
Three hours before the destruction of Emeth’il
In his dreams, Tsu’min stood below a slab of white granite. The rock was taller than he was, wide enough for three people to lie down on in a line head-to-toe, deep enough for two to do the same. Behind it a wide river rushed into a green, semicircular bay.
There were twelve steps cut into the stone. He remembered that, although he’d been a child when he’d clung to his mother’s skirts and watched a tall, white-haired Sh’ma ascend them.
My mother, he thought hazily. He rarely thought of his mother anymore. Her face swam in shadows. Her voice, when she spoke at all, was unintelligible.
The Sh’ma ascending the stone he recalled clearly. His father. Aimere. The first of the Sh’ma.
In his younger years Tsu’min had called out to his father in dreams, to warn him or to ask for his help or forgiveness. But he’d since learned to recognize the visions for what they were, and when they came he simply suffered and waited for them to end.
His father reached the top of the stone and began to speak.
He was telling them about the humans. That was why we were there, my mother and I—to be exhibited. That was always why we were there—right up until the day she died and my father realized that I wouldn’t age and pass out of his life.
Tsu’min shivered with the memory, and the dream changed. The sky darkened. His mother’s body grew skeletal and gray, as it had been when she died, and she faded into the darkness. His father’s chest split open in a spray of blood, and he crumpled onto a crystal throne.
A nightmare, Tsu’min thought dimly. He separated his mind from the fear in his chest. Just a nightmare.
The sky turned black and the buildings burst into flame. He heard screaming, shrieking, watched people around him start to run. And then there was something behind him, a faceless being of smoke and heat, and he was running too, as fast as his little sandaled feet would take him but not fast enough. The heat was growing, and the smoke was in his face, his nose, his lungs.
Strange, he thought. Why?
He woke with a start. The canvas of his tent flapped above him, snapping as thick currents of air pushed it around. Heavy smoke flowed over his face. He looked for its source and found the coals of his campfire, smoking more strongly than expected in the wind.
Tsu’min’s eyes watered, and he stood to get above the smoke. The sky glowed lavender and gray behind the white branches of the trees and their leaves. The air felt warm and humid, the ground cold and damp.
The white roofs of Emeth’il stood a mile away, unburned and untouched.
Tsu’min blinked off the last of the smoke. The Eshuar’a’me, they called the stone his father had stood upon. It lay in a plaza at Emeth’il’s heart.
Tsu’min sat before his fire and fished a breakfast of fruit and rice gruel from a ceramic jar.
I know, he told whatever part of him had woven the dream. I know what you want me to do. He needed to speak frankly with Tyash, and he needed to warn the people of Emeth’il what was coming.
But his heart resisted. He’d gone so long without Mi’ame that he couldn’t bear to leave her again.
Sucking the gruel from his fingers, he walked to the rise at the edge of his camp. Maegan Heramsun snored beneath her canvas not far away. Soren Goldguard had made camp somewhere farther off.
Emeth’il glimmered like a white serpent sleeping at the line between forest and sea.
The dragon will burn it all, Goldguard had said.
The necromancer was right.
Tsu’min had stood at the heart of Emeth’il with Mi’ame long ago, bringing word of the dragon’s release and the call to arms. He had passed through again after Lomin’s pogroms and seen the destruction that the Changebringer had wrought there.
The city had been burned before.
Tsu’min stayed on the knoll for hours. The sun drew closer and turned the thin strands of cloud across the sky from gray to pink to orange to white. The coals of the fire cooled and died. The gulls over the bay grew louder, and the wind calmed into a still dawn in which he heard only the sounds of the sea and the forest.
When the first orange light of the sun struck his face, he set off.
***
The plaza opened up before Tsu’min in a pool of wide gray stones. Long, flat riverboats lined the banks of the river behind it. Larger, rounder fishing vessels dotted the bay to the east. White and black gulls wandered everywhere—in the air, underfoot, floating upon the dark waters. Spotless white buildings garlanded in creeping vines and flowers stood around the plaza’s edges. The music of a dozen buskers swept up and down in a constant, friendly contest.
Above it all rose the Eshuar’a’me.
The stone stood silent and empty, the bier of a public discourse that had died long ago.
Tsu’min walked to it.
Twelve steps carved into the granite lay before him. He felt the warmth of his mother’s legs, the coldness of his father’s eyes. The stone was c
overed in the waste of gulls; it hadn’t been used except by the birds for longer than Tsu’min cared to guess.
He brought the green bead around his wrist to his lips.
When his foot struck the first step, the plaza began to quiet. The musicians laid their fingers over their instruments. The traders stood in silence at their creaking stalls. The young stared wide-eyed at the stone, their games forgotten.
By the time he reached the third step, all was silent save the gulls.
Tsu’min ascended slowly, let word whisper through the crowd of merchants and buskers and buyers like sparks between storm clouds. The birds upon the stone vacated in squawking protest.
The morning sun beat bright and hot upon his head, and he breathed deeply.
He was ready.
“People of my father,” Tsu’min began in Sh’ma. “Today I bring you a warning.”
The Emeth’ma prickled his skin with their eyes. Their white clothes rippled in the wind.
The gulls called.
The sea crashed.
The river flowed.
And for the first time in many years, Tsu’min Nar’oth spoke to a gathering of his father’s people.
FORTY-TWO
Minutes before the destruction of Emeth’il
Soren’s feet flashed over leafy paths. He leaped streams, ditches, logs. The town of Emeth’il twinkled in the sun ahead of him.
It wasn’t going to twinkle for long.
He could feel the dragon, racing from the west over Soultholenash, a tidal wave of darkness covering leagues in minutes, flying hard toward him, toward the Sh’ma, and toward Tsu’min Nar’oth.
No, he thought.
He’d slept well, and for only an hour longer than the sun. When he arrived at Tsu’min’s camp, he’d been happy that the nar’oth hadn’t been there, and that fresh tracks had run toward the town from the camp’s eastern edge.
Fool, he told himself. Fool to believe he’d won a victory. Fool to believe he’d re-energized the being most capable of summoning Arenthor.
Fool to think he’d outmaneuvered Sherduan.
The dragon knew. The dragon always knows. And it’s coming for him.